Re: A modest proposal - allow the ID repository to hold xml

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> You didn't say what the additional value would be. We know the
> additional value of a .ps file (drawings that don't translate to
> ASCII art). What is the value of XML? It certainly isn't
> searchability or readability.

While I normally run in horror from all things XML, this is one of the few
exceptions. XML would immediately solve a number of problems I face almost
daily:

- give me a list of all the documents "belonging" to a particular WG

- for any given RFC, show me the chain of document dependencies
(obsoletes, updated by, obsoleted by) that pass through this document

- for any given RFC, generate a dependency graph based on the normative
references in this document

You have to have a structured document format to programmatically solve
these sorts of problems, and XML provides that. (While I've become quite
adept at searching rfc-index.txt with less, I really want something
better.)

And I second Ned's comments about generating *useful* diffs between
document revisions. This is especially useful if we generate drafts in XML
format.

I'm not sure how to address the problem with legacy RFCs. I'll bet we
could find volunteers to generate XML equivalents from the existing plain
text documents. (We would need an XML tag to indicate which of the plain
text or XML documents is considered authoritative.)

And just to eliminate any lingering doubt, I'll note that I'm now using
xml2rfc for all my current and future drafts. (There, *that* just gave
several people heart attacks ;-)

--lyndon


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